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The anti-congestion argument
Our ancestors were rare Modern research has shown that the "genetic bottleneck" in human evolution was not a bottleneck event at all, but that early humans were rare all the time. Yet they spread over large areas. Fossils of prehumans are, for instance, extremely rare, and the fossil record does not support the idea of an extreme drop in early human population at any one moment, adding even more evidence for constant rarity of early humans. Earlier theories thought that the "bottleneck" was caused by the Toba volcanic eruption 75 000 years ago, but archaeological evidence from digs in India shows that anatomically modern humans had left Africa before the eruption and survived. Since their probable descendants still fit into the "most genetic diversity in Africa and no distinct races at all" model, the Toba eruption cannot have been a genetic bottleneck event at all. This means that the normal malthusian evolutionary rules did not apply to human evolution at all. Sociobiological implications Nonmalthusian evolution means no contradiction between egoism and altruism and that there was nothing to win on the "cheater" strategy. That may have been crucial to the evolution of ex''telligent traits such as culture and language. Thus envy evolved ''not ''as a way of creating competition, but as a way of learning from the experience of others ( "I want to know how to do/make that" instead of "I want that", because there was no scarcity of material resources). This can also explain why humans justify things. The mainstream psychological theory that justifications are mere after-constructs would, if it was true, preclude any Darwinian explanation of how justification evolved, since the existence of such after-constructs would inevitably cause a Darwinian selection that favoured scepticism towards all justifications, and that scepticism would inevitably make the after-constructs useless in Darwinian terms. The nonmalthusian life our ancestors lived does howewer mean that they lived without confrontations. So it seems that the sci-fi idea of a "post scarcity" society had a real life equivalent in the form of a prehistoric "pre scarcity" society! Research have shown that apes do not deliberately educate, but merely imitate by uninvited watching, and then only imitate the parts of the process that are necessary to reach the desired result. The most probable explanation is that the apes are too selfish to willingly educate due to their malthusian sociobiology, and so adapted to a social environment full of manipulation that they instinctually ''expect ''all communication to be deception. A few individual cases of altruism in apes have been observed, but with their malthusian lifeform it is probably a form of rare "mental disorder" that is negatively selected by evolution, comparable to the case when a lioness adopted a antelope young. Overall the difference between "social" and "solitary" is insignificant compared to the difference between malthusian and nonmalthusian. Pack and herd animals are on average just as egoistic as "solitary" animals, and many behaviors traditionally considered to be typical for "social" animals have been proven to be commonplace in "solitary" animals too. Signals of dominance and submission, as well as deception are common in bears and cats. A strong cat claiming territory with good hunting opportunities but letting a weaker cat take places with poorer hunting opportunities are not so different from a strong chimpanzee eating the best fruit but letting a weaker chimpanzee take not-so-good fruit. It is only the geographical distribution that differs. The difference between malthusian and nonmalthusian, on the other hand, goes much, much deeper than mere geography. Deletious effects of overpopulation Humans started to run out of "vacant lots", in which to move, six to seven millennia ago. Wars and hierarchies appeared multiple times independently in most of the world at roughly the same time. That was almost certainly ''because the nonmalthusian lifestyle became infeasible due to the lack of "vacant lots". Then, competetive tendencies should first have been concentrated to geographical areas with "tempting" resources. The swing from relativism to universalism in anthropology during the last decades may not have been new interpretation of the same data at all, but because the last nonmalthusian skansens were ''actually malthusianized that recently! Just slightly older field studies showed a lack of war, hierarchy and greed ''in areas without tempting resources. And altough most extant hunter-gatherer tribes are xenophobic, that does not ''mean that early humans were. Archaeological analysis of the geographical distribution of different types of stone tools prove that early Humans exchanged ideas unhindered by clan borders. Some stone tools found in France even prove exchange of ideas between (modern) Humans and Neanderthals! So the best explanation of xenophobia in most surviving hunter-gatherers is the fact that hunter-gatherers are under exterior threat today! After all, most remaining hunter-gatherer tribes ''are in great danger of having their hunting and gathering grounds taken over by farmers, mining companies and so on, which gives them a, well, not strictly nurture, but certainly more like nurture (rather than nature) cause to be xenophobic. Technically the term "metacultural scarcity" would be more appropriate. The same scarcity that causes hunter-gatherers to be xenophobic is of course what causes "industrialized" people to be greedy and loophole-exploiting. That greed and loophole-exploitation then forces rigid unreasonable rules and laws into existence (or should it be called necessiates?) which then unjustly stops also the few good-intentioned attempts to do anything significant, leaving the destruction of the environment (as well as war) unstopped. So "being violent and not taking care of the environment" is not a result of "human nature" but a (indirect) result of global overpopulation! It is probably the confrontations in present-day life that forces people to make up after-constructs, so confronting people with why they did something just damages their brains and makes them become more animalistic! Traditional San people avoided that problem excellently with their taboo against confronting people so that they are forced to defend themselves and their actions. Conspiracy theories are a cultural convergence towards animalistic suspicion toward arguments, as is of course also the mainstream psychological theory that rational explanations should be after-constructs, see the section above. The future Sociobiology in the broadest sense is correct, but mainstream sociobiology is still based on a malthusian path that human evolution did not take. So there is absolutely no reason to fear aggression, megalomania or anything like that from the self-sufficient space colonies.Fear of such things are a mere result of a congestion-ridden metacontext! The colonists must of course be able to create new space colonies as opposed to being irrevocably packed together in one closed habitat, and also rendezvous with other habitats when they want. It is possible to build those possibilities into the space colonies and spacecrafts. The argument that "children born in generational ships would have no choice" is based on sheer ignorance of this fact. There is, howewer, if we do not colonize space, a danger that the malthusian lifestyle can cause a genetic selection that makes Humanity reverse-evolve into non-extelligent mere apes. That danger justifies the classification of the anti-congestion argument as a subcategory of space and survival. But it is not too late. Yet. Extraterrestrial generalization The nonmalthusian effects would almost certainly extend to extelligent extraterrestrial life as well, since malthusian evolution are not condusive to the evolution of extelligence. After all, competition means motif for deception, which selects for suspicion toward arguments, and that suspicion toward arguments makes language impossible, no matter if it is on an alien world. So Stephen Hawkings quote "I think it would be a disaster" about alien contact is unscientific. And as mentioned in extraterrestrial life, aliens who are (temporarily of course) warlike because they are from a dying or overpopulated world can be made peaceful by being taught how to build habitats in non-naturally-habitable environments in the vastness of space. And if aliens passing through this solar system needed water, why should they loat Earth when there is lots of comets around? The fact that all lifeforms with a intelligence that passes knowledge on must have a non-congestional evolutionary history means that any culture that invents space colonization technology would use it to avoid congestion, and thus not concentrate on one single world and make it constantly radio-noisy. That means SETIs demand that alien signals must be ongoing and not temporary is probably the reason why they have not confirmed any. SETI have actually detected with several telescopes independently more than 30 signals that cannot be explained by terran or from Earth launched sources. The wow-signal is just the most famous one. So "the great silence" is probably a misinterpretation. The icecube analogy Some pessimists would argue that there is enough resources on Earth and therefore believe greed to be in human nature. But that argument, apart from being sociobiologically ridiculous, ignores the fact that﻿ greed comes from the fear of not having ("if I do not take it, someone else will") which must have been started somehow. The most probable explanation is that early overpopulation forced people to be greedy, and then the existence of greed kept forcing people to be greedy even when technical innovations made it possible to have a decent life for everybody anyway. It is not as irreversible as it may sound. Imagine you have a bowl full of water outdoors in winter, and keep it from freezing by using a heat lamp. Then you lower the output of the heat lamp, and the water freezes. Then you turn the heat lamp up to its original output again, but the ice does not melt, because ice reflects more light than liquid water! What do you do? Do you despair and declare that "the solid state is in waters nature" or do you turn the heat lamp output up even higher, so that the ice melts anyway? This means that colonizing one world at a time in space will not solve the congestion problem. It takes an open multi-frontier to "melt the ice of greed" and truly undo overpopulation! Astronauts experiences During the cold war, many astronauts and cosmonauts who were phanatic jingoists prior to their space journey became pacifists during or soon after their journey. That effect may at least in part be due to the experience of the space journey as a sort of "preludium" to the nonmalthusian condition. See also Future human evolution No men in black